


The Long Con

by Measured_Words



Category: The Wondersmith and His Sons - Astronautalis (Song)
Genre: Brothers, Con Artists, Dysfunctional Family, Exes, F/M, Family, Lies, Magic, Magical Realism, Mild torture, Restraints, Vampire Hunters, Vampires, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/pseuds/Measured_Words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All she has to do is find Evan.</p><p>That's all.</p><p>Maybe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Con

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> This treat is basically a thank you for introducing me to this fascinating song :D I hope you like it!
> 
> Thanks to Nary for betaing! And remaining errors/inconsistencies/etc. are all on me.

"Oh, he's been here." Vanessa looked around the room, taking in all the small details that signalled her quarry's presence – or at least his recent presence. Despite everything she could see, it was always smell that confirmed her instinct that she was on the right track. It was intimately familiar.

"Yes, officer – er, agent." The hotel clerk was nervous, as if maybe she could sense that there was more amiss than Vanessa had let on.

"He paid in cash?"

She nodded. "Yes, paid a week in advance. Polite and quiet, no complaints from the other guests..."

"Never had the room cleaned, did he?" He wouldn't have wanted to let anyone inside. And of course the room had nice thick drapes that were drawn shut.

"No. He always hung out the sign, so the staff never looked in. They were talking about it earlier today."

"And you never saw him go out during the day?"

The clerk paused before answering, taking just enough time to wonder if Vanessa was judging her for inattentiveness and no doubt to consider just how polite she should be to the FBI. Most people came down on the side of being very polite. "No ma'am. But I did see him come in with someone once. A tall brunette, she might have been Latina. Long hair, pretty? I don't know, I'm not good at descriptions. I don't think she was uh, a whore or anything. An escort, I mean."

Vanessa was already smiling though – gotcha. "That's alright. Do you have any cameras we could check?"

\---

The hotel did have cameras, and Vanessa managed to get permission to look at them alone. That was mostly so she didn't have to explain why her quarry didn't show up with his tall brunette lady-friend. Somehow digital images were fine, but anything with film or tape was a no go and this place still used VHS. Tracking the woman down based on a quick glimpse from a grainy security image should have been hard, but Vanessa had some tricks of her own. The question was whether this time she'd be able to catch up before he'd moved on.

Evan Smith – that was the name he'd always used with her. His two brothers, Elliot (older) and Eric (younger) had already been caught out, more was the pity. Eric was the real shame. That had been messy, and she could have used Evan's talents to try and explain away what people had seen. Mostly they believed he'd been dead when they found him – just lying in bed, dead without a mark on him. It had been later, after the sun went down, when things had gone south. Eric hadn't been a fighter, though, and it was apparently pretty impressive what a couple of morgue technicians could manage when corpses sat up unexpectedly. Fortunately no one seemed inclined to believe much of what they'd said. In their panic, they'd tossed the body in the incinerator, so there was no evidence, either

Vanessa was still mad she hadn't gotten there sooner. She'd liked Eric. He was quiet, for one thing, mostly too absorbed with his numbers to bother anyone of his own accord.

She still didn't know what exactly had happened with Elliot, but he'd been the most traditional in some ways. He was always very careful, even when dealing with the rest of his family, but his weaknesses had been too easily exploitable – terminal OCD. She'd never been completely sure how they'd identified the remains, or how the state of decay had been explained, but it wasn't worth worrying about at this juncture: he was dead, for real this time.

That just left Evan, reckless, charming Evan. He wasn't as clever, he wasn't as careful, but he had a silver tongue and all of the tricks their sire had taught them. He could talk anyone into anything, including himself. And, of course, including her.

The brunette's name was Alina Vasquez, and she lived in a penthouse that probably didn't belong to her. Evan had always liked to live dangerously. No doubt he'd charmed an invitation out of her within about five minutes of their first meeting. It was all he'd have needed. Vanessa checked her equipment as the elevator rose up the floors. It was the middle of the day, so it should be easy, relatively. There wasn't going to be anywhere for him to go, at least.

The door was locked, but Vanessa knew how to charm the lock, and she didn't have the same limitations, as she'd never been fully turned herself. It popped open with a soft click, and she pushed the door open, revealing darkness. Of course. If she listened carefully, she could hear slow and heavy breathing coming from one of the other rooms – Vasquez, no doubt, and either drugged or just exhausted from blood loss. She'd be completely in Evan's thrall regardless, and it would be better if she could just stay unconscious.

Evan was probably with her. Vanessa pulled the fire poker out of her bag. She'd bought it at an estate sale – it was silvered. The door to the bedroom swung open quietly, hitting the wall with a light 'thump'. There were two forms on the bed, and the heavy curtains fluttered in the breeze. He'd left the window open, then, but probably as an ingress rather than an exit. 

Vanessa stepped through the doorway, and felt the charm release. She'd been expecting it, and when Evan bolted awake and sat upright she was already crossing the few feet to the bed, swinging the poker. It caught him upside the head hard enough to knock him back down. Good. He fell back against Alina, but she just kept breathing steadily, oblivious. 

Evan managed to get his hands up in front of his face before she landed the second blow, but the silver raised steaming red welts on his bare skin.

"Wait!" he managed to get out before she hit him again. Vanessa didn't intend to give him a chance to get any more words out – it was too dangerous. Luckily, he wasn't a fighter, and it didn’t take too much more to subdue him.

Vanessa peeled him off the bed, wanting to get him bound before he came around. The silk rope had been saturated with holy water and it, too, burned as she hogtied him. That done, she checked on Vasquez – the woman was pale and unresponsive. Well, Vanessa had been there before. She'd survive and, if she was lucky, she'd just be confused about exactly what had happened in the past few days. Not much to be done about the blood though.

"Vanessa, baby..."

She whirled around – she hadn't expected him to come around quite that quickly, and it caught her off-guard. She shouldn't have looked. Somehow he'd managed to turn over so that he was facing her and, bound though he was, he smiled up at her, and she could feel her resolve weakening.

"How'd you find me, babe?"

She should hit him with the poker again. And gag him, if she could risk getting that close to his mouth. But he wasn't going anywhere unless she let him, and that wasn't going to happen. Instead, she just waved it in his face, gratified at how he shrank back away from the silver, his smile turning uncertain.

"Our old friend Agent Gilster." Gilster was a stolen badge and access to some key national databases that Evan had conned out of someone else. The identity came in handy, but it had been pretty heavily compromised.

"Gilster?" He raised a shoulder in an awkward shrug. "So you are working with him?"

"Your father wants you to come back home, Evan, yes. You can't make anything easy, though can you?"

He smiled wider and, to cut off whatever too-clever remark he was about to make, Vanessa pressed the end of the poker to his cheek.

"Ahh!" He leaned back even farther, but at least the smile was gone. "If you're going to kill me, I'd appreciate if you stopped toying with me first – torture doesn’t become you."

"You know I’m not.”

Despite everything, she didn’t know if she could kill him, or even if she wanted to. She’d hunted him and she’d caught him - for now - and she’d go on playing her part and do her best to bring him back in more or less one piece. The welts on his arms were blistering where they touched the rope, and he winced.

“I’m just wondering what he told you, that’s all.”

Vanessa laughed at that. “Do you think it matters? He had some complicated tale to tell, about how you’d betrayed him, how you’d put me in more danger than I knew, it was for your own protection….. He was disappointed when I didn’t hear him out. Even after I agreed to play along.”

This seemed to confuse him. “You don’t care?”

“I don’t trust you. Either of you. You have your schemes and he has his, and I can’t even tell if you’re really working against each other or if this is all part of some bigger con! How long has this been going on? Years? Decades? Centuries? You’re vampires! All I have left - _ALL_ I have left - is the idea that maybe, just maybe, if I do everything right, I can get my life back. That’s the long con I’m playing on myself.”

Evan smiled slowly. “That’s not all you have, babe. Tell me you don’t enjoy it, just a little.”

She shook her head. “I’d enjoy it better on my own terms.”

As soon as the words slipped out, Vanessa could see the danger in them. She’d given him a hook, a way in. That was exactly how his charms worked, and exactly why she’d hoped to shut him up.

“What terms would those be?”

“Don’t try it.” She managed to sound stern, brandishing the poker again. “If you can keep that silver tongue of yours closed up behind your pretty pearly teeth until the sun goes down, I might let you keep them.”

Evan just smiled.

Vanessa dragged him out into the living room, leaving the bedroom for the penthouse’s tenant. Evan fell back asleep pretty quickly and Vanessa spent the next few hours watching trashy television shows and obsessing over exactly when and how her life had taken the sharp left turn that had brought her to this point. It might have started with meeting Evan about five years before, but things had gotten so convoluted and mixed up over time that she wasn’t sure anymore. Evan was cocky, but with Elliott involved in the planning stages his more theatrical tendencies got reined in. Everything was more carefully designed – at least in theory. Evan was harder to control once things were set in motion, but his brothers had always been pretty good at accounting for this.

The point was that even if it had seemed like a chance encounter, she couldn’t discount the possibility that she’d been purposefully recruited to serve their little team – their family. She fit in too well.

Vanessa checked on Vasquez one last time before the sun started to set. The woman was already recovering, and had slipped at some point into a much more natural sleep. That was a good sign for her, and also served as confirmation that it was time to get Evan and go. 

She hadn't been waiting for his benefit – it was just a lot harder to get away with tossing a body rolled up in a tarp in your trunk while it was still light out. There was no way of knowing exactly when Evan would wake up, but if he'd been feeding well off of Vasquez, it could be a while. That suited her just fine.

Lugging him down the stairs was a pain, but she had a charm that made her a little stronger as well, and it helped. She didn't really have that far to go – just a few hours out of town to hand him off. Then, theoretically, she'd be clear of all her obligations to the family and could go her own way. She still didn't believe it.

Evan woke up sometime between when she hit the interstate and actually made it out of town. Vanessa heard him banging around, but thankfully she couldn't make out anything he was saying. She was having more and more mixed feelings the longer she drove, and having to listen to him would have definitely broken her remaining resolve. And of course the question lingered – what would her terms be, to flip and work for him? Would it be a bad investment without Elliott and Eric to back him up? What was her endgame?

Her ponderings came to an abrupt halt when the gaslight came on. Vanessa swore – she had gassed up right before she'd driven to the penthouse. Checking her phone told her there was one gas station nearby, and a few more about thirty miles away on the turn off towards some podunk nowhere town. She could charm a few miles out of an empty tank, but thirty was pushing it. There wasn't much choice but to pull over now, even if her instincts were screaming that this was some kind of setup.

The gas station could have been nice, with a pay-at-the-pump option, clean bathrooms, and a wide assortment of snacks. It was not. It was just about the opposite, in fact – little more than a shack with an Exxon sign, with two gas pumps and one diesel. It did have a large parking lot that currently hosted several big tractor-trailers, the lone streetlamp casting their dark shadows over the pumps. Vanessa could see the attendant watching television inside. There was a cooler with some drinks and cold sandwiches, and an aging display for some kind of motor oil. The camera, placed exactly right to capture license plates, nixed her idea of pulling the gas station equivalent of a dine-and-dash. She swore.

If she was careful, she wouldn’t have to lose sight of the car, and there was a direct line from the pump to the door and back out. Evan was still tied up and wrapped in a tarp in the trunk. He might be awake but he wasn't – shouldn't be – going anywhere.

Vanessa pulled up, got out, and pumped her gas. The night was still and warm, with not much to hear other than some insects and other cars passing along the highway. And some thumping from the trunk. She rapped it with her knuckles and he quieted down – even more worrying, though she tried telling herself that it was just that he knew that causing a scene would only cause him more trouble in the long run. 

Thirty dollars was enough to get her to the rendezvous, so thirty was all she put in. Glancing regularly over her shoulder, she walked up to the station and in the front door. She'd been so focused on watching the car that she'd apparently missed someone else approaching – just as she made it up to the counter, the side door swung open, and a tall skinny man in a worn t-shirt stepped inside.

"Hey man – you sell beer in here?"

The attendant looked right past her, ignoring the handful of bills she'd thrust at him for the moment.

"Nah, sorry," he started to answer, when an engine roared to life outside.

Vanessa whirled away from the distraction just in time to see the hinge on her trunk still swinging, and the unmistakable form of Evan piling into the back of another car. It was already speeding out of the parking lot by the time she made it outside.

There was a box cutter in the trunk, along with the remains of the ropes and tarp. The box cutter, to her knowledge, hadn't been in there before. Maybe she should have searched Evan more carefully, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch to think she could have overlooked something that obvious. There was also a note, which she quickly shoved into her pocket. The attendant and the other customer had just come out, presumably to check on her.

"They take anything, ma'am?"

Vanessa shook her head. "Didn't have anything worthwhile, I guess, or else they did have time."

"I looked back on the tape, but they musta known the camera was there – it didn't catch nothin' but your trunk flyin' open."

"Thanks anyway." She shoved the thirty dollars in his hand. "I'm going to get out of here, if you don't mind."

"You don't want me to call the cops or nothin'?"

But she was already climbing into the driver's seat, closing the door and starting the engine. There was no way she could catch up with them – the three of them. There had definitely been three in the car when it sped away, and she'd recognized the silhouettes. It almost wasn't worth wondering how, let alone why.

The note, when she finally stopped to read it, was definitely in Evan's handwriting, shaky though it was. She could just about believe he'd had a pen on him. Maybe even a scrap of paper. Maybe he'd charmed it all out of the air, or maybe she should have taken that bit about him having tricks up his sleeves more literally.

_Trust me, baby. I know what you need. You’re in good hands._

She crumpled the note up and tossed it out the window. Maybe the best way for her to get control back of her own life was to side with them, after all. The brothers would let her find them if that was what she wanted. All she'd have to do was give them a sign.

For now, Vanessa just raced down the highway, aiming for the sunrise.


End file.
